Abstract: In Mexican Masculinities, Robert McKee Irwin explores the “homoerotics of nation”— that is, how literary representations of social relationships between men defined what it meant to be a man and, he argues, to be from Mexico between the early 1800s and the middle of the twentieth century. The study builds on, and then departs from, Doris Sommer’s contention in Foundational Fictions (Univ. of California Press, 1991) that “the symbolic construction of nation as an imagined community occurred in nineteenth-century Latin America through romantic literature’s use of heterosexual bonds as an allegory for national integration” (p. xxvii). Regarding Mexico, Irwin asserts that “national brotherhood,” as opposed to marriage, “came to symbolize national coherence.” Indeed, he notes that “male homosocial bonding is the key allegory of national integration in literature” (p. xxx). Irwin explores such themes as criminal male sexuality, the gendering of literature, and the homosexual panic of the 1940s and 1950s. To support his thesis, Irwin mines an impressive variety of well-known literary texts, broadsheets, novels, and popular science fiction to produce a discussion of the links between masculinity, sexuality, nation, and power that historians interested in issues of gender in contemporary Mexico will find thought-provoking.McKee Irwin clearly articulates the book’s goals, arguments, and operating assumptions. He distinguishes between maleness and masculinity, noting that maleness refers to common, “natural” physical characteristics, whereas masculinity references learned or acquired attributes and behaviors. The first chapter explores ideas about masculinity and male sexuality across the nineteenth century, a period during which, Irwin argues, heterosexuality was viewed as the only natural form of sexual expression. Yet at the same time, intimate friendships among men were depicted everywhere in the national literature, even if they were not recognized as homosexual relationships by the reading public. He reviews such texts as Vicente Riva Palacios’s Los piratas del Golfo, Florencio M. del Castillo’s Hermana de los ángeles, and José Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi’s well-known El Periquillo Sarniento. Irwin argues that this nineteenth-century focus on male characters points toward virility as “a key concept in laying a foundational framework of national identity” and that “ubiquitous homosocial (and often homoerotic) bonding between men is the foundational trope in nineteenth-century Mexican literature” (p. 47).Irwin’s examination of the ways in which gender and sexuality were understood and represented during the Porfiriato will resonate with recent work by historians such as Pablo Piccato, Robert Buffington, and Cristina Rivera-Garza. The second chapter focuses on representations of criminal male sexuality and scandals such as the dance of the “Famous 41.” The author turns to amateur criminologist Carlos Roumagnac’s studies of criminality and sexuality, as well as novels such as Federico Gamboa’s Santa, which portrays the life of a prostitute in late Porfirian Mexico City. The scandal (provoked by a police raid on a dance at which 20 of the 41 attendees were in drag) set the stage, Irwin argues, for a new discourse linking homosocial behavior and same-sex desire at the beginning of the twentieth century.Irwin’s discussion of virile versus effeminate literature in the context of the Mexican Revolution is the basis for the longest and perhaps most accessible chapter for readers not specialists in Mexican literature. Here Irwin analyzes male relationships in such renowned novels as Martín Luis Guzmán’s La sombra del caudillo and Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo, as well lesser-known novels and texts, including Eduardo Urzaiz’s Eugenia, a futuristic science fiction account of a society in which men bear children. Describing what he calls the “great virility” debates in the 1920s, he notes that writers rejected the elitist modernism of the Porfiriato and portrayed virility through a nationalist literature that dealt with such gritty revolutionary themes as warfare, social conditions, and class struggle. In a provocative reading of Los de abajo, Irwin locates homoerotic images within the passages treating soldier Demetrio Macías and city slicker Luis Cuevas, arguing that the era’s so-called virile literature was nevertheless compatible with images of male same-sex desire. Irwin concludes with an examination of the publications and public image of the openly homosexual group of writers known as the Contemporáneos, who defied nationalist prescriptions regarding appropriate masculine behavior. In the last chapter, Irwin argues that by the 1950s, “homosexual desire and homophobic paranoia of homosexual desire are crucial aspects of Mexicanness” (p. 228).Mexican Masculinities complements a growing body of work on sexuality in Mexico and builds on recent examinations of gender and sexuality in Mexican literature, including work by Claudia Schaefer and Debra Castillo. The volume may, at times, prove alienating for readers not deeply familiar with the texts under discussion. For the most part Irwin takes care to introduce the authors and themes, but occasional lapses makes for frustrating reading. Finally, some readers may disagree with his identification of homoerotic themes in specific passages or his downplaying of the roles of women—as mothers, daughters, teachers, prostitutes, soldaderas, and so on—in literature and political discourse regarding the Mexican nation. Analytically sophisticated and ambitious in the range of topics it treats, this book offers an intriguing study of both famous and lesser-known texts. Its arguments regarding gender representation and nation are well worth consideration by historians of society, culture, and lo mexicano.
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-08-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 191
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